“Two Variations on Virtue Hath Gone Out of Me [1999] by J. Kirk Richards”
i. An Issue of Blood
Pressed into shadow by the pulsing throng, by
twelve years of doctors’ visits and indigence,
emptying and emptiness, she shrugs off
apprehension, placentas in prayer, then
raises her hushed brazen beneath the swarm:
sidestepping propriety, she fishes the tempest
for the Physician’s styptic hem. Nerves fervid,
fawning, her fingers hook his tassels, linger, release.
Her touch stanches the rush, disrupts his passing through.
Off-balance in the tremors of her rebirth, he turns, asks
after the encounter. Her secret relief yields to exposure.
Lanugo-new, she parts bodies, braces against
his witness, and unravels her epic, her voice swelling
crowd-ward through the bullhorn of his cupped hands.
– An updated and revised version of a poem previously published as “Reaching for the Hem” in Victorian Violet Press Poetry Journal (no. 5, 2010) –
ii. Talitha koum
1.
Your body disrupts the narrative:
Jairus—unaccustomed to want—
calls Jesus to pull his daughter
from death. Jesus comes, touches
the girl; she rises. Just like Jairus
rehearsed it.
But you unravel the plot.
Your back to the wall and miscarried
hope, you swaddle in threadbare
anonymity, veil yourself with a crowd,
and wait. Bodies press bodies and
the tide swallows Jesus swallows
you; and you, wearied by your
constant wound, retreat into dolor’s
dark womb: the slim pocket of mourning’s
clenched fist. Fetal within the ache,
folded and unfolding into your history,
you dip your hand in the stream
of fabric and flesh, trawling the fringe
for deliverance.
Without you, maybe
Jesus makes it to the girl before she
dies, maybe he doesn’t need to reach
as deep into the grave to revive her.
Yet your imposition stalls him, steals
the life Jairus reserved with his plea.
Pausing at the doorway, hand raised
to part the white noise, head tilted
to home in on your touch,
Jesus digresses, questions the intrusion.
The swarm surges to silence. And
the girl slips from her father’s hope.
2.
But you see it, there, on the tip
of the Healer’s tongue: the girl’s name
reaching to pull her from the deep end
of death, its familiar litany ringing
across the courtyard of her childhood,
weaving its strands around her hunger
until she can no more resist the pull
and runs home, bursting through
the door, hoping for something to eat.
– First published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought (51:4, 2018, pp. 165–67) –
Tyler Chadwick, an award-winning writer, editor, and teacher, received his Ph.D. in English and the Teaching of English from Idaho State University. He teaches writing at Utah Valley University and has three books to his name: two anthologies, Fire in the Pasture: 21st Century Mormon Poets (Peculiar Pages, 2011) and Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry (Peculiar Pages, 2018), and a collection of poetry and essays, Field Notes on Language and Kinship (Mormon Artists Group, 2013). He lives in Ogden, Utah, with his wife, Jess, and their four daughters.
